One aspect of commercial photography is creating portraits with special effects. The wide variety of effects available include soft focus, vignettes and burned corners. These effects are created by placing a mask capable of producing the desired effect in front of the camera lens before taking the picture. This procedure, however, can become quite inconvenient. Each mask must typically be manually inserted into position before the picture is taken, and then manually removed afterwards. Even devices that contain multiple masks on a single template suffer from this drawback. The photographer must manually rotate or otherwise properly position the template before use. This can become particularly tiresome and perhaps lead to errors when a sequence of photographs are being shot.
Prior art masks contain a further defect. Zoom lenses are commonly used in portrait photography. When using a mask with a zoom lens, however, the mask must be continually repositioned each time the zoom lens is adjusted to compensate for the changing focal length of the zoom lens. This requires a skilled photographer and a great expenditure of energy to ensure that the mask is properly positioned.